22 April 2013. A World to Win News Service. Women and men are once again holding extremely angry protests in New Delhi targeting the police and government officials following the kidnapping, rape and horrendous torture of a five-year-old girl. Demonstrators continued to besiege police headquarters for the third day on 22 April, demanding that the police chief resign. The chief argued that the officials could not be held responsible because “the problem is one of mental depravity. The problem is one of mental sickness. And that will not be sorted out by anyone resigning, least of all the leader of the police force.” Yet for many people, the crime against the little girl was bad enough, but the behaviour of the police demonstrated that the Indian state does more to encourage such crimes than to prevent them.

It was as if the power structure were thumbing its noise in the face of the mass anger anger that mounted after the rape and murder of a young Delhi student last December. While India is experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of reported rapes and cases of sexual abuse, the authorities have tried to portray this as a good thing because it supposedly shows that women have more confidence in them. But when the girl’s parents went to the police, after neighbours heard the her crying in an apartment where her abductors had left her for dead, the police offered them 2,000 rupees ($37 dollars) to remain silent. Reports of similar rapes of little children began to appear in the media, including a four year old girl in the city of Nagpour currently on life support after violent sexual abuse.

The government reacted by banning gatherings of more than four people on New Delhi’s main avenue, where students had planned a protest. About a hundred defied the ban by demonstrating at the city’s famous India Gate. Television news viewers witnessed a large police officer slapping a woman demonstrator in the face. Yet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeated the police’s defence, that there is little the authorities can do to prevent “depraved behaviour”.

After the outrage sparked by the rape and murder of the Delhi student in December, the Indian parliament passed a law with new penalties for rape, including the death sentence. Cries for more police protection and laws went up amid this latest round of scandals. A leading woman police official called for “sensitivity training” for officers, a measure some people have supported as a step toward dealing with an unbearable situation.

Following are excerpts from an article by Mrinalini Paul from the West Bengal-based Web site sanhati.com. It was posted on 31 March, before these latest outrages, but it is more relevant now than ever. The author addresses the demand that India’s existing state provide more protection for women and seeks to show that this state, with its police, courts and parliamentary system, is a concentration of the problem and not part of a solution.

Chhattisgarh is a state in central India, part of a large area in central and eastern India where the Communist Party of India (Maoist) is leading tribal peoples and peasants in armed revolution.

A month of travel in Chhattisgarh meeting with the people, organizations both state-run and people’s, since the distinction between the two is unique, one encounters numerous instances of people’s rights being denied by none other but the guardian welfaristic largest democracy of the world.

Ledha, a tribal woman from a small village in Sarguja district of Chhattisgarh, was married to Ramesh Nageshila, a tribal who was a member of the Maoist party. Since a woman’s identity is inextricably linked with that of her husband’s, Ledha was also branded a Naxalite [Maoist revolutionary fighter] and was sent to jail on charges that she was a squad member and participated in a landmine blast killing CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force] personnel. She was in jail for a year and a half, during which she also gave birth to a child. Due to the effort of her lawyer, Amarnath Pandey, she got bail for a month to give birth and then was sent back to jail. Finally, however, Ledha was acquitted. Ledha’s advocate, aware of the complications that could arise even now, advised her to show the acquittal order at the police station so that the police would not harass her in the future. The police this time pressurized Ledha into making her husband surrender while promising to offer money and a job in return. Ledha managed to convince her husband, and SPO [Special Police Officer] Kalluri arranged for the surrender on 28 May 2006. However, Ledha’s husband was shot in front of her eyes, and she was let off only after being terrorized about dire consequences if she dared to reveal what had happened.

The next day’s papers carried that there was an encounter in Shankergarh police station limits and a Naxalite had been killed. Ledha, helpless and scared, returned to her village only after a few months to find out that the police were looking for her. Picked up and taken to the police station, Ledha was raped by SPO Kalluri in front of her parents and her child. The next day a notorious SPO called Dheeraj Jaiswal, with four other constables, came to Ledha’s lockup and gang-raped her. This went on for ten days after which Ledha was ultimately released. In January 2007, Ledha still determined to fight, met a lawyer and filed a case against SPO Kalluri and others in Chhattisgarh High Court.

The judiciary, however, did not really get a chance to deliver justice. Ledha was picked up by the police while her parents were tortured, and forced to file a case against her lawyer, Amarnath Pandey. And then one day Ledha arrived in police escort and asked for her file back from Advocate Saurabh Dongi. Dongi mentioned that his client appeared to be under pressure, yet the High Court accepted the application of the subsequent “legal aid” lawyer to withdraw her petition.

[In another case] a dalit [so-called “Untouchable”] woman was socially boycotted by her village on the mere pretext of accessing the water tank of the dominant caste, a phenomenon common in the system of caste discrimination as practised still in Chhattisgarh and many other states of India. However, this woman found a way to court through HRLN Chhattisgarh (Human Rights Law Network) and a writ petition was filed in Chhattisgarh High Court under the SC/ST Atrocity (Prevention & Prohibition) Act. The judge at this hearing completely negated the wide potential of the Constitution by simply dismissing the petition though he “appreciated the cause” but confessed to the advocate that her client seemed “too oversensitive.”

The newspapers on 6 July contained the news that on the intervening night of 5th and 6th at about 3 am, an encounter took place between the Chando Police, of Balrampur Police District, Sarguja, and the Naxalites, and a minor girl, Meena Xalxo who was alleged to be part of the Naxalite team, was killed in the encounter.

The real story goes like this, as based on the accounts of the villagers and the consequent fact-finding team’s investigation: Meena Xalxo was raped and killed by the police, only two or three shots were fired, the key witnesses who heard the sound were consistently pestered by the police to change their statement more in tune with the police department’s, the victim’s family got a compensation paid of 1 lakh [200,00 rupees] and the brother a job at the government school nearby as a clerk. Such behaviour towards a Naxalite’s family was unexpected. The discrepancies in the case stem not only from the police department that has yet to file a FIR [First Information Report] even after having received the father’s representation, and the accompanying panchnama [report based on witness statements] and the sarpanch [village official] dated 7 July 2011, to the effect that the police had killed Meena Xalxo and she was not a Naxalite, but also the redressal mechanism put in place, a one-member magisterial enquiry had been set up and an office also provided, though it is at 200 km from the scene of crime. This enquiry has yet to sit or even visit the village a year after the incident.

The doctor conducting Meena Xalxo’s postmortem clearly cited the possibility of rape and consequently a vaginal swab was sent for testing, but the laboratory said that the sample was too little to be tested and no logical conclusion was possible. This piece of information was read by the media, however, quite differently, and TV channels and newspapers portrayed it as a clean chit given to the police.

On the night of 14 September 2012 around six Special Police Officers entered the village of Koyabekur (around 25 km from Sukma) late in the night when everyone was asleep. They tied up three men and dragged them mercilessly all the way out of the village. The women of the village at this moment arose and gathered outside, blocking their way and demanding a reason for such violence. The SPOs did not bother to stop for an answer but shoved them into the mud and manhandled most of the women as they hurled abuses at them and did not refrain from even kicking them with their boots. In this act, the village’s mukhiya [leader], an elderly woman of 60 or more, was struck by one of the police with a sharp object on her ear and had to be rushed to the hospital for an operation the very next day.

The false implication of Ledha leading to her being in custody while pregnant, the failure of the Maoist-surrender policy leading to the death of her husband, and the direct infringement on her rights and dignity when raped in custody, is not where the role of the state function of maintaining law and order ends, but continues to perpetuate its violence by manipulating the entire process of the justice delivery mechanism. The same can be seen in Meens Xalxo’s case as well. While in the second case of the dalit woman, the structural manifestation of historical injustice is further strengthened when the judge restrains from even ordering a police enquiry into the incident. The assault on the women of Sukma subsequently is an assault on their collective consciousness and is aimed at further subjugation of these already marginalized sections. The State’s treatment of justice and use of violence [state violence whose purpose is to protect and perpetuate injustice], through its various arms and machineries, as verified empirically through the cases in this article, which are not exceptions but only representatives of the numerous others that lie out there, unexposed, unheard and unclaimed, substantiates the need to perhaps theorize the role of the State as a whole all over again.

The danger lies not only in such widespread use of violence but the impunity offered to the perpetrators because of their close affiliation with the State. The crimes committed by the thousands of troops deployed in Chhattisgarh are only a drop in the vast ocean of crimes committed against women by men in uniform, especially in places of an “occupation” or the lands of AFSPA [so-called ”disturbed areas” where the armed forces exercise “special powers”]. Hence the need to go beyond the demand for harsher laws or harsher punishment, and the plea to question the very politics of violence against women.

The challenge posed is a greater one than a State versus victim in any other scenario, as can be best elucidated by citing the Soni Sori case. [Sori, an Adavasi (tribal) schoolteacher in Dantewada, Chhattigarh, was arrested in 2011 and charged with assisting the CPI(Maoist).] Soni Sori’s case, in comparison to the four cases cited in this article, received great amount of legal and non-legal aid, media coverage and so on. However, a year into the case, a group of women’s and other organisations staged a demonstration at NCW [National Council for Women, an Indian government body] demanding for a probe into her condition in jail. The NCW was forced to reopen the case, but after visiting the victim, came out with a report that suggested only the need for “counselling”.

When such horrific incidents in regard to Soni Sori’s case involving insertion of stones into her vagina, repeated use of torture and humiliation in the jail, strip searches and granting of transfer of custody from Raipur to Jagdalpur after more than a year, all seem to be taken care of by “counselling”, the main accused in her case, Ankit Garg, was given the gallantry award. [In January 2012, Police Superintendent Garg, who Sori says supervised her torture, was awarded the Police Medal for Gallantry for his role in a 2010 action in which 250 officers killed six Maoists and two civilians in what was described as a police ambush. Garg and officials insist that the schoolteacher sustained her injuries, including stones doctors later found lodged deep in her rectum and vagina, when she slipped and fell in a bathroom.] So much for the State’s mechanism that is in place for dealing with violence against women by one of its own arms. Hence lies the tragedy, that in a case of State violence against women, when even evidence is inadequate, who or what will put a stop to this injustice?

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.